The anniversary of The Crash April 25, 1985

 


Perhaps it is a stretch to celebrate the 13th anniversary of a car crash that broke my nose. But in some ways, it was a lucky day when looking back at it, even if at the time it seemed like a disaster.

That night when Hank driving came around a curve too fast in a despite attempt to make up time getting to the rock clubs in Greenwood Lake and crashed into another car making a k-turn.

Hank doesn’t see the accident as lucky, partly because he broke his neck as opposed by my broken nose.

This, however, was not Hank’s first accident, nor his last major ailment, and treatment for his neck became the first of four hospital events in six years – any of which could have ended his life at any moment.

While the crash that broke his neck was the most dramatic, it was among a number of such events I was to endure with him – nor was it unusual.

Hank was a terrible driver from the beginning, a fact that drove his father crazy, when his father helped him learn how to drive.

Within the first week of learning, Hank backed up into his own house, knocking down the front porch.

The second week, Hank hit his neighbor’s car when it pulled out of the driveway next door.

Things got no better when Hank’s father hired professionals to teach him. Hank managed to pile up six parked cars, but maintained the accident wasn’t his fault.

My first accident with Hank came a week after he finally got his license in 1968. He came to pick me up at my uncle’s house in Clifton and drove down Lakeview Avenue back into Paterson, passed the cemetery to the circle near the Alexander Hamilton Projects. We got stuck trying to get onto Market Street from the circle, and when we did, Hank drove onto 20th Avenue when another smaller car pulled in front of us. The tank of car Hank drove totaled the other car with almost no damage to his. No one was hurt. But Hank’s father refused to lend him the family car again.

We were far less fortunate 13 years ago when we slammed into the side of the car on our way to Greenwood Lake. The Dodge Dart Hank drove was no where near as armored as the car his father had taught him to drive in. This was also before seat belts were required. So, I hit the dashboard with my face. Hank crashed through the windshield, mangling the steering wheel on the way.

This was Hank’s second Dodge Dart. He, Pauly and Rob had driven his first Dodge to Nova Scotia, a trip that made the car self-destruct.

He loved his second Dodge Dart more even than his first, being a year newer than the one he had driven north in. He had this vague plan to keep buying newer and newer cars until he finally managed to purchase a completely new car.

Hank, however, had changed a lot since our days wandering The Village in 1968. Many of the carefree values he had professed back then had vanished – he stumbling ahead into a more conservative 1970s along with our whole generation. He started possessing things and grew attached to those things he possessed.

The changing scene in New York – the crime, the out-of-control drugs, and his breakup with Laurie changed Hank, and steered him back to New Jersey and a job on an assembly line, and nights as a barfly.

But he was still on the cusp that night 13 years ago when we rushed up to the rock clubs in New York seeking to find a little taste of what we had lost in Manhattan, he still heart broken, with me on the verge of a break up with Louise, Greenwood Lake the last vestige of the old life, the hippie life, the life that passed us by in a wink of an eye.

Then came the crash, and Pauly and Jane to our rescue in their little blue VW bug, dropped off at my apartment in Paterson to a cold reception from Louise, who woke up, looked at our wounds, yawned and went back to sleep, telling both of us what once had been was then over.

It foreshadowed the horrible times just ahead, and yet, served as a release, from the life we had and we could not sustain, setting my feet on some new and unexpected path, the crash a permanent marker in time for me and Hank, a painful anniversary that by good fortune kept me from being trapped into something else, something even more painful.

 

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